February 27, 2015

Of course it’s an excellent film, made in a
perfect ascetic way, but it is this perfection itself that bothers me — there
is something false in it. No wonder Ida made so many people feel good: everything that
happens is utterly predictable, there are no surprises. The guilt for the
murder of Ida’s family falls on the ordinary poor farmer, and the guilt-ridden
Wanda, a promiscuous Communist judge, kills herself. As for Ida herself, after
tasting the forbidden fruit of sex (clearly using the saxophone player as a
mere instrument), decides to enter the convent, thus bringing about a
fantasy-like image of a Jewish Catholic nun. The film immediately aroused in me
the desire to imagine different versions of the outcome: what if Ida decides to
get married to the sax player, and it is Wanda who discovers faith and becomes
a nun? What if, in their inquiry into who killed Ida’s family, the two women
discover that a local priest was also involved? One can argue that such a
different film would have been much better.

And some guy called Matt on the frankly incredible notion that Titanic’s Jack
might have been sent from the future, thus making it a time travel film. But why not? I haven’t watched it recently
enough to disprove it. Plus, unmentioned but surely strengthening the case is
the similarity with Cameron’s Terminator.

February 8, 2015

“On the way home, Allen stopped off in Kansas, eager to see Burroughs
once again. The two went through a Native American sweat lodge purification
ceremony that lasted all afternoon and evening. They even took in the new film
Naked Lunch by David Cronenberg, which was both horrific and funny. It was no
longer Burroughs’s novel, but a cut-up of all his works, presented as a
collage. Still, they both enjoyed seeing it.” Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself:
The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.

February 7, 2015

American
Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014). Even if this movie Chris Kyle is more idealised and easier to like than the real one, he still persists as a warning about gun love, war damage and the impossible expectations
of duty and responsibility to family and country. Like The Deer Hunter a
generation ago, American Sniper is concerned with how conservative values
create soldiers and how the same values can destroy them (training that breaks down
your personality and reconstructs it surely helps too). But an awful question is left hanging: where would we have been
without the tragic and ironic ending? It would be a much less ambivalent, less
complicated story.

February 5, 2015

World War Z (Marc Foster, 2013). Sentimental about children and family,
militaristic and respectful of authority, lacking in satirical intent, wisdom
or insight: here is a zombie action film that is the complete opposite of everything
George Romero was getting at.

February 4, 2015

The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, 2014). Thinking about the big
stuff (time, the universe, its creation) but operating at the domestic level. Neither
is satisfactorily resolved – making the title seem unearned – but both are given
remarkable and affecting life by Eddie Redmayne, playing the junior scientist with the eccentric exuberance of a young Beatle, and Felicity Jones as the woman who loves him. Actors trump script, easily.

January 29, 2015

Wild (Jean-Marc Vallee,
2014). Drug user and unfaithful wife Cheryl brands herself with a new surname
(Strayed) and gets back to nature, with her walking as ordeal or punishment or a pilgrimage to a better self. Nature not city: “I’d rather be a forest than a
street.” It’s not quite damning with faint praise to say that this is better
than you expect any film about Reese Witherspoon taking a long walk alone to
be, but she does bring a rare toughness to it and the editing (credited to Jean-Marc Vallee’s pseudonym John Mac
McMurphy with Martin Pensa) does a fine job of mimicking the shape and feeling
of persistent and painful memories. At times, this is almost visionary. The
shooting is by Yves Belanger, who also lensed Vallee’s Dallas Buyers Club, to
which Wild is a natural companion.

January 26, 2015

Still Alice (Richard
Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 2014). To lose one’s memory is a slow-motion
horror story, and you already knew that Julianne Moore would do all that so brilliantly,
but what can you say about a screenplay that gets its greatest emotional effect
by quoting Angels in America?

January 21, 2015

“ … went to England from
Spoleto and stayed in style with Panna Grady and ran around a lot, finished
proofs small book now published Cape-Goliard, yakked on TV and sang Hari
Krishna in Hyde Park pot picnic, spent evening with Paul McCartney (He says “We
are all one” i.e. all the same mystic-real being), spent a lot of evenings with
Mick Jagger singing mantras and talking economics and law-politics during his
court crisis – found him very delicate and friendly, reading Poe and Alistair
Crowley – on thick carpets with incense and wearing ruffled lace at home –
later spent night in recording studio with Jagger, Lennon and McCartney
composing and fixing voices on pretty song “Dandelion Fly Away” everybody exhilarated
with hashish – all of them drest in paisley and velvet …” Allen Ginsberg to
Robert Creeley, November 28, 1967, from The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited
by Bill Morgan.

“The Maysles brothers aside,thisis the Altamont
movie. We have to deal with Altamont – and of course Jagger knew about Altamont
even before it happened.Performancewas shot nearly two years ago, long before the apocalypse at the
Speedway, but it’s all here in final form – future tidings neatly catalogued
and even pre-analysed. A line from Jagger’s song: ‘We were eating eggs in Sammy’s
when the black man drew his knife.’ This is a weird movie, friends … Hence a
witchcraft ritual, black magic, hallucinatory soul stealing, at the end of
which . . . the apocalypse. Black magic is tricky stuff, and there is no free
lunch; Turner pays the only price there ever was … One of the attributes of
evil is its ugliness, and on one levelPerformanceis a very ugly film. Hallucinatory though it may be, I would not
recommend seeing it while tripping.” Michael Goodwin
in Rolling Stone, September 3, 1970.

January 16, 2015

Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014). Yeah, yeah, we all hate Tom Cruise but his comic
look of disbelief – conveyed to the no less incredulous audience – is the only
thing going for this punishing Full Metal Starship Groundhog Aliens sci-fi
mash-up that has a strong WWII vibe, right down to a D-Day re-run, now against those
spidery starship groundhog aliens we talked about. Groundhog D-Day it is, then.

January 15, 2015

Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2014). This is the newest last superhero movie, after Watchmen (which didn’t make the grade) and The Dark Knight, with the subversion now shifting to the other side of the camera. This is actor insecurity, actor narcissism, actor competitiveness and actor anxiety sending itself up: can former Birdman star Riggan Thomson (former Batman Michael Keaton) make the transition to Broadway in a too-realistic Raymond Carver adaptation? What happens when actors act too much? Why are all the great actors in capes? So many questions. This incredible two-hour stunt has all the meta ingeniousness of a Charlie Kaufman script (call it Being Riggan Thomson), executed with astonishing skill and wit by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and genius cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (of Gravity and Malick fame). Did you ever expect the director of 21 Grams, Babel and Amores Perros to pull off such a context-specific New York and LA comedy? Did you ever expect to see a vain Hollywood star lounging ostentatiously with some Borges on his sunbed, as part of his “process”? Did you ever expect … and so on. Here is a reminder that you can still be surprised.

January 12, 2015

Mother Joan of
the Angels (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1961). Starker and more cerebral than Ken Russell’s
The Devils, to which it could be an unofficial sequel, but made a decade
earlier. Don’t look for Poland-under-communism metaphors either. Long exorcism scenes
are the centrepiece, and some of the possession actions suggest that William Friedkin
was paying attention – but again, so much less lurid. At its heart, there are
theological questions – how does love find expression when it’s suppressed or
thwarted?

January 7, 2015

Mr Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014). There is still the Mike Leigh gift for Dickensian
caricature but with the added weight of real life, carried through years or
decades by an eccentric, fond Timothy Spall performance as the grunting genius painter.
Art, physical pain, suppressed grief, disease and decrepitude, even sex. All
that, but also the film is so deeply funny in its use of arcane Victorian
dialogue and its affectionate view of the machinations of the art world, a nest of vipers
then and possibly even now. Is the gruff defiant painter a Leigh self-portrait and the
prissy Ruskin a crack at all critics, even those who support him? Too easy,
surely. But this is a masterpiece either way.

January 6, 2015

Exodus:
Gods and Kings (Ridley Scott, 2014). “For my brother, Tony Scott,” says the
dedication from Ridley Scott. Was that the most moving moment? How else to understand his interest in this story of
two brothers who are not really brothers but whose competitive yet never cruel
relationship is the strongest in the movie, perhaps the only real relationship
in the movie (wives are perfunctory, even interchangeable, and God is a problem). Otherwise, unlike
Aronofsky’s Noah and Gibson’s Passion, this is an entirely impersonal Biblical
epic, suffused with doubt and heavy on the CGI (and eyeliner). No one seems to
know what to do with the spiritual dimension.

January 5, 2015

The Wind Rises (Hayao
Miyazaki, 2013). How strange that just yesterday we were talking about the
dreams and memories of flying that Werner Herzog put into the mouths of Walter
Steiner and Dieter Dengler and then Herzog turns up as a voice actor in the
dubbed version of the final Miyazaki film, itself a stunning romance about
dreams and flight. The Herzog moment is one of deep seriousness. Compared to the best-known Miyazaki – Howl’s Moving Castle,
Spirited Away – this is more old-fashioned in tone, not at all supernatural and with a melancholic mood and ambivalence. Weather is so beautifully done: has anyone
ever animated wind, rain and snow like this before?

January 4, 2015

Pulp: A Film
about Life, Death and Supermarkets(Florian
Habicht, 2014). Like Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s Nick Cave film20,000 Days on Earth, Florian
Habicht’s film about Pulp avoids the routine conventions of the rock biopic by
imagining a day in the life – and not of the star this time, but of the setting
that produced the band and to which they returned for a possibly final concert
in December 2012. No Habicht film is predictable and this one has an
audience emphasis or a fan’s eye view and a strong sense of his ebullient
personality. Habicht can seem in his documentary work like a sunnier, more
naïve Werner Herzog, throwing left-field philosophical questions at his
subjects. He asks Pulp front man and lyricist Jarvis Cocker what he last
dreamed about, and then illustrates the dream, which has Cocker changing a car
tyre in front of a Sheffield housing estate, a meaningful fantasised scene that
runs like a version of the dreams and memories that Herzog has given to
subjects like Walter Steiner and Dieter Dengler.

“Are you
trying to get a snapshot of Sheffield life, the hopes and dreams of the common
people?” says one of Habicht’s more sarcastic interview subjects, and it’s true
that he puts more stock in the wisdom of kids and the wisdom of grans than in
the words of experts. There are no ageing rock journos here to tell you what
Sheffield means, no one to talk about the Human League or Cabaret Voltaire or
even Def Leppard, let alone the “socialist republic” and the steel history, and
the closest thing to a narrative of the group is when Sheffield guitarist
Richard Hawley measures the 12 years between Pulp’s first albumItand the breakthrough,Different Class, by holding up
their sleeves in a record store. No one recounts Pulp’s influences or talks about
the first albums they bought or the time they saw Bowie do “Starman” onTop of the Pops. Author Owen
Hatherley’s book-length analysis of “Place, Sex and Class in the Music of Pulp”
is condensed into just a couple of sentences. Instead, the film is an
affectionate fantasy, a portrait of a city that inspired a band and a band that
then provided some soundtracks or unofficial anthems for the city, with “Common People” forever trumping the others. And you
may even worry that there is too much of the so-called common person here, but
this could be one way for Cocker to keep the spotlight off himself. If in20,000 Days on Earth, Cave came
across as an almost entirely isolated figure imprisoned within the persona he
has carefully constructed, the allegedly fame-allergic and highly literate
Cocker purports to still be akin to the people he is singing to and about, so
he just as skilfully evades our scrutiny.

January 1, 2015

Joe (David Gordon Green,
2013). The Southern Gothic doom and violence is laid on thick but there is an
impressively grimy realism to this: only Nicolas Cage, as the titular Joe, and
Tye Sheridan, teenage veteran of Terrence Malick and Jeff Nichols, look like
movie actors. The homeless Gary Poulter was discovering by casting scouts in
Austin, Texas and his performance is the most complex and heartbreaking in it
(he died before the film was released). But Cage’s brooding charisma is
something to behold too.